Recent Purchases: Scores - Part I

So I only ended up buying two albums during the Varèse sale of one day (-20 %)

Executive Decision by one Jerry Goldsmith. That name sounds promising.
Alien: A Biomechanical Symphony. Featuring monsters and butch females in a concert setting.

Cannot wait.

Still haven't received the new remastered Terminator score. I'm wondering when it'll be back.

So, nobody's buying any scores around here?

Well, except for some of the special releases (expansions and such) I practically don't either anymore.

I've just ordered:

Volcano (Silvestri)
Starship Troopers (Poledouris)
Fimucité 6: Universal Pictures 100th Anniversary Gala

Since I love the performances on the Fimucité Alien Symphony that Varèse put out in 2012, I'm extremely looking forward to that one. And the other two of course.

My acquisition rate has dwindled down for several reasons. Almost all scores I was ever interested in I have now in my collection. At 1100 CDs I find myself unsure occasionally whether I own a certain CD or I don't. A collection that I am not entirely familiar with makes no sense to me. There is still great film music being composed in many parts of the world. But often when I like a score I think that I have several scores of the same style in my collection already and further adding up doesn't make much sense. Especially since you can today listen to a lot of new stuff via streaming.

I know what you mean. I stream almost all the new stuff and just buy the occasional track from this or that album. It takes a really good score to get me to buy a whole album. Or it takes a score that I've heard is great from a lot of people, but that isnt on Spotify.

Hey Christopher I just checked iTunes only has the one available I mentioned.

In other news, I decided to finally buy The Ghost and The Darkness expanded release by Intrada, but digital rather than physical. Curiously it's Lalaland that recently released it on various digital outlets, like iTunes, Google Play, 7Digital and Amazon. I got it at 7Digital because it's the only one that apparently sells it in lossless format (FLAC). At only 11 euros one of Jerry's most inspired scores becomes an absolutely steal, the only thing missing of importance is the booklet and info therein.

If one wants to see the complete list of digital releases, click here.

It's only logical that today I've ordered the blu-ray of 'Hollywood in Vienna: The World of James Horner'. I've already witnessed the concert on YT but I wouldn't be a true fan if I said this didn't belong in my collection. Besides the superior picture and audio quality alone will make me experience it like new. After its arrival, I'll cherish this concert forever.

Since my last post of 2010 I must have purchased +15000 (at least) of new scores.

Today's batch:

Henny Vrienten - Pietje Bell 2
Ulises Hernandez - La Edad de la Peseta
Dimitris Kontopoulos - Loufa kai parallagi: Seirines sto Aigaio
Bruno Coulais - Belphégor Le Fantôme du Louvre
Martina Eisenreich - Reine Geschmackssache

as qui-gon says, there's always a bigger nerd

ONLY 1500?! what a casual man

Certainly two foundational scores in my own film music journey! Awesome!!

A couple of thinks that I have bought recently - in addition to the CDs I showed off at the Zoom meeting - have been eclectic downloads.

SEJI - Ramón Poveda Arriati - is a weird score for a Chilean horror movie.

12 HOUR SHIFT - Matt Glass - is another weird (yet compelling) score for a US horror/comedy.

THE PROMISED NEVERLAND - Masahiro Tokuda - a more easier-to-listen score for a Japanese fantasy movie.

Just the very first messy Media Ventures score story that led many (even non-MV) people to work on it and actually the Chase cue being ultimately miscredited. To focus on the cue at hand, it needs a bit of an introduction, that said though, the whole story is a doozy, so I'll perhaps recount in one day in detail.

Generally speaking, Nick Glennie-Smith was hired to do it. My guess was that he got the gig on the strength on his additional cues for both Bad Boys and Crimson Tide, but that's just my theory. The production (namely Bay and Bruckheimer, whether Don Simpson was close to the process, I have no idea, but this was literally the end of him due to his massive addiction, he actually passed away after they finished the film and the score and film are dedicated to him). He tapped the new addition to the group, Harry Gregson-Williams (just off moving to Los Angeles after Richard Harvery recommended him to Hans as a choral conductor on Crimson Tide) as his assistant on the project and off he went. They started struggling with the material and eventually Hans was asked to salvage the project. The rescue job started when he scored the shower massacre scene. The cue was loved so much that they put it in the main title sequence and the theme became a major theme in the film. The little trumpet figure at the end became the Hummel theme. Lots of people contributed due to the haste of it and... then happened the car chase.

The car chase is credited to Don Harper and, I think, Steven Stern. The crucial name here is Harper, who at the time was the main assistant to Mark Mancina, but contributed additional music to Broken Arrow (the first half of the film was helped by HGW, the second by Harper). However, in the middle of writing the cue... Harper decided to go on vacation, which led Zimmer never to work with again (he stayed, loyally, with Mancina), so in truth most of the cue was actually written (and many times rewritten) by Harry Gregson-Williams (there is a Zimmer quote about it which I don't remember at this moment, quite hilarious). Some people claim that it's perhaps even the beginning of HGW's personal style (namely Edmund Meinerts) and perhaps there's merit to that, but that's always been the least favorite cue of mine.

When it comes to Zimmer's contributions the sure-fire cue is the chopper flight to Alcatraz (the SEAL incursion) . There is a prominent thank-you to (wrongly hyphenated) James Newton Howard, which led to rumors of ghostwriting. As Hans recalled, what happened was that Hans called JNH if he can rip off a cue of his and JNH agreed. The cue would be this one, as presented in the second half of Rock House Jail (took me a while to get the joke, years, literally) or The Mission (as it's called on boots). They were already great friends after Hans graciously gave Howard his sample library to facilitate the very, very quick deadlines of Waterworld.

Complete mess. And for some reason, the most messy MV/RCP scores have to be Bruckheimer productions, even if they didn't actually originally have RCP/MV composers (Armaggeddon is another one, oh that one is beautiful).

Also, one of the worst album programming ideas ever was dropping this one right at the very end of the album. I was never the biggest fan of it, but I never skipped it, unlike the two last tracks of my all-time favorite score, which I do on a regular basis... :mrgreen: